
New Corn on Tap for Southeast
Dairy Farmers By Jan Suszkiw May 25, 2000Though its name sounds like a new Air
force fighter jet, GT-HID9 is actually a source of yellow dent corn germplasm
that should mean good news for southeastern dairy farmers. That good news could
arrive in the form of new commercial hybrids developed from GT-HID9 primarily
for two key traits: adaptability to the Southeasts sandy Coastal Plain
soils and warm southern climate, and fodder from whole plants that dairy cows
can readily digest as either silage or forage. Currently, few such hybrids are available to dairy farmers in southeastern
states like South Carolina, Florida or Georgia, where 95 percent of corn is
grown in the Coastal Plain. Now, with the April release of GT-HID9 seed to
plant breeders, new silage hybrids could become commercially available to
farmers within six years. GT-HID9 itself is the product of 10 years of work by
Agricultural Research Service scientists
Neil Widstrom, Roger Gates and Glenn Burton, now retired, using a technique
Burton first pioneered for breeding forage grasses, called restricted recurrent
phenotypic selection. Widstrom and Gates are with ARS
Crop
Genetics and Breeding Research Unit, located at the
University of Georgias
Coastal Plain Experiment Station
at Tifton. There, from an old corn hybrid called Coker 77B, they propagated and
screened thousands of inbred plants for desired forage and dairy silage
properties. With the help of an in vitro procedure, and cow rumen, they finally
zeroed in on GT-HID9, a plant population whose dry matter digestibility ranking
exceeds Coker 77Bs by more than one percent. In the cows rumen,
where microbes busily digest fiber, this seemingly minor increase actually
means substantially more nutrients from silage becoming available for producing
milk. A larger-scale trial is now underway to document this benefit in GT-HID9
silage-fed steers. Seed samples can be requested from Widstrom using contact information given
below. ARS is the U.S. Department of
Agricultures chief scientific agency. Scientific contact: Neil L. Widstrom,
ARS Crop Genetics and Breeding Research Unit, Tifton, Ga., phone (912)
387-2341, fax (912) 387-2321,
[email protected].
Story contacts Roger N Gates Jan R Suszkiw U.S. Department of Agriculture | |